Saturday, January 30, 2016

It's the midpoint of the school year. Final exams are graded but not all given back to the students. There are still stacks of worksheets to grade and a few extra credit points to assign, and the comments to write, and the report cards to finalize, and the 3rd quarter's syllabus to finalize, and the Latin Olympika Certamen tests to write, and ... and... and...

This will be my final year teaching at Cedar Tree. I have known for a year or more now, and it is a good and necessary change even though I will miss my 16 years of teaching Latin to young minds. But somehow it has become That Thing That I'm Afraid to Blog About, and that has kept me from writing as much and as freely as I need to on this blog, for the last year. I have noticed a distinct lack of the spunky sense of fun that I think my blog should have, although the very few who do follow this blog have probably, at most, only thought, "hm, she's not blabbing as much anymore." We all live in the world of our minds to some degree; I especially plead guilty to replaying and overthinking and overanalyzing every decision. If you're wired this way, it helps tremendously to have some kind of creative outlet (knitting, quilting, writing) and a circle of supportive friends; so I will be unpacking my thoughts on the idea of not being a teacher anymore over the next months. I don't require comments or feedback, although I'm by no means shutting them down. There's a lot I, personally, need to process and my personal blog is the most logical place to do it. Even there and presuming I share it to Facebook friends, I'm always fearful of negative feedback. But first, you know, I have to make the initial announcement. So, yes. I'm not going to be a Latin teacher after this year.

I get some people who ask "What will you do?" These are the people who have no memory of me as anything other than a Latin teacher at my kids' school. With the best of intentions, I'm sure, but this only has the effect of making me feel more typecast into a role somebody else wrote for me. I have always enjoyed the Latin teacher identity, but I have 4 young adult (well, teenage at least) children, one of them with special needs, a 100-year-old house, and far too many hobbies and interests to keep up with on one blog. I have been teaching longer than any of my students have been alive. I'm relatively sure I will find plenty to do. Whether any of it will make money or not is quite another matter, but money has always been a secondary consideration for me. Rather obviously.

I could stick in the Latin field and be quite happy, doing things like creating this course on the Duolingo discussion forum. I'm rather proud of it, even though it's not official and not finished yet. I believe that some of my more conventional study guides and lesson plans would be useful if published. Or I could devote myself to researching the legal and financial steps needed to prepare Tertia for life and work as an adult with Down syndrome. I could take a few months and schedule all the medical appointments I've been putting off far too long, then another few months for that thorough housecleaning that has never happened. I could write books, people! Or I could just make a lot of quilts and sweaters. I used to be a community organizer... some people have found that leads to very prominent careers. There are some who think that William Shakespeare, during his "lost years," was a teacher of Latin at a country grammar school. He had a pretty good second act.

So, there are my ramblings for today. It will be back to quilting and wooly endeavors and blabbing about literature, philosophy, family, politics and who knows what else after this, I sincerely hope.

Monday, January 25, 2016

Let's be completely up-front about it... when it comes to putting together a bed-size quilt like Allietare, my design wall is just not big enough. You need the family room floor, and you need to vacuum first if there's been a sleepover last weekend. So after I came home from teaching today I unpinned the sampling of blocks from my design wall and started laying them out on the floor. Then I decided I really had to change into jeans, because there's a fair amount of crawling around and rearranging. This is what I came up with, trying to keep a pleasant variety of both reds and golds throughout.

I love the scrappiness of this quilt -- I decided midway in that I was going to go broader in my use of reds and golds if I had to be more restrained in my blacks and neutrals, and I'm glad I did. It makes the overall effect very lively, to have such a wide variety of tones. Including those red/white/black prints that wanted to play! They jump out and say "notice me", but in this quilt, that's going to be okay! I double checked to make sure no two gold squares were matchy with each other at the corners, and I think I caught them all (is anybody else bothered by scrappy quilts that aren't scrappy enough?) I don't think that will be a problem for me with this one! Now to find time to stack and label the rows from NW to SE, and I can begin the sewing together.

STASH REPORT! It has been about a year since I've tried this, and SOMETHING needs to be done to keep me accountable. Plus, I finished the Grand Illusion top Saturday, so that means I can count stash used.

Saturday, January 23, 2016

This week we were blessed with back-to-back phone calls from our two college sons. Peter called to report on how his classes are going, and let us know he is joining the crew team. Exciting news for him and a new sport to pick up. He is finding his way around the U.W. campus and his room has ended up being a single, which is fine with him. He's taking classes toward a business major, including one on the hospitality industry, and two music classes. He missed a lot of social opportunities by coming in as a freshman just this semester instead of in the fall, but I'm sure he'll be making it up in no time. Daniel is in his final semester at Grove City, taking an honors English seminar and slated to write a seemingly impossible number of words per day, and figure out his future plans in the space in between. The house has been quieter since they have been gone, and cooking for only 4 is strange.

Tertia's theater class put on a play this week: Cafe Rio, a series of vignettes from larger works on the theme of how theater addresses social justice issues. So they had an opening scene from "Cabaret," a French Resistance scene, a bit from Anne Frank and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a bit about the arrest of Alan Turing for homosexuality, a scene from Anouilh's Antigone, a scene from Tesich's On the Open Road, and then Tertia's scene... she had no speaking part but was a background walker in a scene from "Mr. Universe," a play about two drag queens in New Orleans. I'm not sure how it portrayed social justice issues, but Tertia walked her little heart out in the background and had a fine time doing it.

Quarta's friend G. came over yesterday evening for a sleepover; they watched the Star Wars episodes they hadn't watched the last time (6, 1, 2, and they are in the midst of 3 as I write), with some breaks for Target runs, frozen yogurt, sleeping, making makeup out of Crayola crayons, and doing their nails.

I've been following the East Coast blizzard news with interest; my brother Andy was planning on making his annual bus trip to the March for Life but it was cancelled and he is enjoying a snowy weekend at home in Virginia instead; I hear there are several busloads stranded on the PA turnpike, and it reminds me of the March for Life of 1989 when I was in a similar bus during a similar storm.

And in a little time in my sewing nook today, I made my first finish of a quilt (top) in 2016... and 2015 as well, for that matter. Here is Grand Illusion.

As Tim Gunn from Project Runway would say, "It's a lot of look." Busy in a very nice, mid-century way. It reminds me of my Grandma Maffett, her greens and blues, her black and white tile floors, and her favorite pink flowers. The individual fabrics are really whimsical and varied, though, which is part of what makes this type of scrappy quilt so fun for me to make. Now let's see if I can get Allietare together. And get some of these tops quilted.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

It was one of those "if you give a mouse a cookie" moments. Although I still haven't been blogging much, I have been chipping away at various quilting projects in an attempt to get back to having something to blog about. There is Allietare, with all the blocks finished and needing the setting triangles and borders:

There is Grand Illusion, which looks like this at the moment:

You'll notice I ran out of the gold constant fabric that shows up in the squares, and I had to substitute the gold stripe for the inner borders. That's because, when I was playing catch-up last month, I mis-read one of the clues and I made 25 of each kind of 4-patch, instead of 25 of the one and just 4 of the other:

That means I have a lot of "orphan blocks" to use in a future project, and also I used too much of the original gold and had to use the other gold. But I actually like the stripe better, so it's all good. There was getting to be a large pile of fabric on my worktable as all these different scrappy quilts piled up, and I hadn't put any of the old fabrics away yet because I wasn't sure I was finished with them (and this was taken a few weeks before Christmas!):

But! I never met a scrappy quilt-along that I didn't want to jump into, and some of the chatter on the Quiltville Facebook page led me to the 365 Challenge from Australia. The idea is to make a block every day, and the ones they were starting with were easy and cute. All 3" squares so far. I decided to go scrappy blue and green, and added that to the mix (Allietare red, gold, black and neutral; Grand Illusion green, pink and aqua; and the flannel baby quilts and string quilts I had been working on as well). Here's the first 19 blocks:

(Yes, that's Dr. McCoy in block 6, scraps from some boxers I made with Star Trek fabric).

There's no denying they are awfully cute little blocks. But little! Did I mention they are only 3"? I have no guarantee that all the different fabrics will work together, but I did make the Farmer's Wife Quilt a few years ago (even though it's STILL on the quilting frame) and that all worked out. I certainly am not worried about running out of blues or greens. But I'm not sure whether I'll stick with it all the way. I think it's a sampler quilt that wants to be more matchy-matchy than I am necessarily willing to be. It's kind of cool, though, to be able to do tomorrow's block today because it's already tomorrow in Australia. But I discovered, in one of those necessary reality check kind of moments, that the huge mess of scraps, bits of fabric, and multiple projects in my sewing area, had made me lose my triangle ruler. So I went looking for it. The more I looked, the more it wasn't there, so I resolved to take the necessary action and remove all the mess from my sewing counter and put it on the floor of the family room:

Um, yes. I need to deal with all that. I have bins for strips that are 1.5", 2", 2.5" and 3.5", and bins for some special fabric collections, and bins for strings and squares and bricks.

First I had to declutter around the sewing machine, and vaccum the lint and dust it nicely. I raised enough dust that I have been suffering from bad allergies for the last few hours, and that's why I'm blogging now instead.

I'm happy to report that my cutting counter has now also been cleaned and dusted. I'm using it as a staging area for cutting up the rest of my flannel into squares (I'm getting out of the flannel storage business by making a bunch of utility baby quilts that I'll eventually give away). Oh, but I did also find my triangle ruler -- it was under some of the other mess on the cutting counter, and I did go ahead and make tomorrow's 3" block. The clean-up of the family room floor is going forward; most of my fat quarters are now put away, as well as yardage. There are about 4 bags or bins of scraps that need to be cut into usable smaller strips, strings, or squares. That's a lot, but I can manage it if I work steadily. And throw out some of the scraps I don't like anymore. I've been discovering quilt projects that have been neglected for a long time. Some of them I don't like anymore. I will eventually have to make some decisions about priorities. Maybe I'll get together a UFO list for the year sometime. But I have learned one thing for sure:

Apparently 4 active quilt projects going at once is the point I start to lose things. And the warning sign is when your cat starts sleeping on your fabric pile. She has had to move:

From on top of the lovely sweater I bought at Goodwill to unravel for yarn, Muffball rebukes me for taking on too much at once. I know, I know. I think I'll go to bed. Tomorrow's block is already done.

Monday, January 4, 2016

It's a bonus day! That's when a surprise snow/sleet storm comes and cancels school the first Monday after Christmas break. (It made getting to church interesting yesterday, too! And I have to give kudos to my mother-in-law, who made the attempt to drive herself to church but turned around when she figured discretion was the better part of valor. We were able to pick her up and have Sunday dinner with her anyway, and returned her safely after helping her with some errands. It was Peter's last family dinner before heading off to college, so I'm glad we were able to have her over.)

This is what it looked like outside my sewing room window this morning. Very pretty! And a good day to stay in and sew! Fortunately for all scrap quilters everywhere, New Year's day marked the release of the final clue in the Allietare mystery quilt by Bonnie Hunter, and we all have something to work on. It is such a pretty pattern, and I'm really excited to see it come together. There are many others doing their interpretation of this design -- check them out at the Quiltville blog link-up party. You can also find links there to download the pattern clues, for a limited time, if you missed it.

Here's what my design wall looks like at the moment. I decided not to remove the rainbow string star underneath, but just pin the Allietare stars up to see the pattern develop. So far I've made about 25 of the main stars and 4 of the Pisa blocks. I also re-discovered that basket of flannels when I was attempting to tidy up some things, and started piecing a scrappy flannel baby quilt as leaders-and-enders, which are pinned on the right. There are three quilts on my design wall (which is not really big enough for a bed-sized quilt), and about 7 others in various stages scattered throughout my sewing room. My sewing room messy? No, I'm just a creative genius!

It's pretty, the way those patterns play off each other. I still like my light gray, even though it's a bit subtle. It saves something to enjoy close-up. If I hustle, I might even get the blocks done today. But probably not. It's a good day for not-hustling.

Flannel baby quilts... my mother-in-law made several for my kids and they loved them to death. These are some scraps from her as well as flannels I have saved for years. I'm trying to clear them out. They're just 4.5" squares. I'll probably back them with more flannel and not put in any batting. It's a good, flexible but comfy weight that way.

I haven't set any quilting goals for 2016, or knitting goals, or anything. I'm still recovering from the great quilting wasteland of 2015, and hoping to finish a few things, that's about all. Maybe in a month or so I'll figure out some concrete objectives. The biggest challenge will be getting back onto the quilting machine. I have had my Farmer's Wife quilt on there for about 2 years now with very little progress in the last year. Yikes!

Saturday, January 2, 2016

The Last Noel had to be moved up by a week this year... instead of a party in the vicinity of Epiphany, we held it on New Year's Day. It was a smaller crowd than usual, but the Sloppy Joes were still very popular and used up almost the entire 15 pounds of ground beef. Since school hasn't started back up yet, the crowd was mostly from church, and the boys' particular friends. It was in conflict with a dance being held by the young people of the church and a few other events, but we still had a nice time and were able to hear people talk for the most part!

My laptop is misbehaving. It is a combination of a dying battery, which doesn't hold a charge long or doesn't charge fully, and a loose charging port, where the connection of the cord to the battery charger requires me to hold the cord in the socket a certain way for a connection to be made, and it's getting harder and harder to make that connection. As a result, I'm increasingly reluctant to unplug it and take it in to school, where it might hold a charge long enough to be useful for an hour or two but I might never get it re-connected to charge when I bring it home. It's on Steve's radar of things that will need replacement soon, I think, but not until after we pay for Daniel and Peter's semester tuition. And the Christmas bills. And the fence repair. Yes, while we were out Monday evening watching the Dr. Who Christmas special showing at the Clackamas Town Center, vandals came along and smashed in several of the pickets on our front fence. And our mailbox, but it's already been smashed multiple times. They tossed a Columbia jacket over the fence at the same time. I don't know if the intent was to cover the damages, but it does fit Daniel after we washed out the delinquent cooties.

Peter leaves next week for WSU; his first Freshman semester, since his AIT ran into September. Steve will go out with him to attend orientation with him and help him get settled; I've been doing all the college shopping runs with him this past week, in between cooking for the Last Noel. He is a quick decision-maker and knows exactly what he wants when shopping. It feels a bit unreal, having two sons in college. Of course, this will be Daniel's last semester. Sooner than we realize, we'll be attending his graduation. Definitely unreal.

I was lazy this morning, recovering from party hostessing last night and drinking leftover punch and spiced cider and eating cookies and pasta salad for breakfast. Then I took Peter shopping for boots, twin xl sheets, laundry detergent and slippers this afternoon. Then I jumped into sewing and worked on the Allietare mystery quilt and two other quilts, heated up frozen pizza for dinner, and watched Brave with the girls. Then Steve and I watched a documentary on the creative and personality conflicts surrounding Gene Roddenberry and the making of Star Trek: Next Generation. It was quite fascinating, actually. Flaky creative types vs. people who approach their art more methodically, and all of them tossed into a mix with bottom-line executives and control freaks. It's a wonder the show ever lasted.

As for myself, I finished 14 blocks of the 50 I'll need for Allietare today, and I'm feeling pretty good about that progress. Pictures Monday, with more progress, I hope.